Recognizing Piano Roll Lyrics
By Robbie Rhodes
Dear Shin, I'm happy you have joined us. Perhaps you can help us find a solution for this piano roll problem:
When we finally are able to make a high-resolution optical scanner for music rolls, I also want to preserve the words which are printed on the margin of the player piano roll, perhaps in a .TIF file or similar.
But the letters (the "character set") on many piano rolls are printed with ink brushed through the old-fashioned cardboard stencil, and the character-recognition software I tried simply wouldn't recognise the letters! I made a photocopy of a bit of a piano roll, and took it to the experts in the Publications shop where I work at Lockheed. They were very proud of the Kurzweil text scanner computer system, which cost over $10,000 at the time.
We tried everything, but it refused to learn: for example, it insisted that the capital letter "B" must be "13", because of the narrow spaces in the stencil between the two elements.
Since that time I'm sure there has been much development in software to perform "trainable character recognition", and I can imagine that the development was driven by need to scan the three Japanese character sets. (Kanji, Katakana & Hirigana -- how's my memory!!)
Can you tell us what's available now that will correctly recognize plain old English printed with the "stencil font"?
Best regards,
Robbie Rhodes |
(Message sent Mon 15 Jul 1996, 05:52:39 GMT, from time zone GMT-0700.) |
|
|
Mechanical
Music Digest™ Archives
